This attempt by the city leadership to communicate with affected members of the population shed light on the deep-rooted conflicts between the two parties.
Tennessee Voices: A conversation with Alisha Haddock and Jill Fitcheard
Alisha Haddock and Jill Fitcheard, chair and executive director of the Metro Nashville Community Oversight Board, spoke with The Tennessean’s David Plazas. Video from 2023
- Elena Wilson is a summer intern on the Tennessean’s opinion and engagement journalism team. She is a rising senior studying journalism at the University of Missouri.
Tensions are rising between Nashville’s black residents and city government, while the Metro Nashville Police Department faces public outrage over its internal affairs and relationship with the community.
After weeks of pressure and preparation by organizations like the Nashville NAACP, Mayor O’Connell went to First Baptist Church, a traditionally black church, on July 30 to discuss police accountability and oversight in a “conscious conversation” with MNPD Chief John Drake, Community Review Board Director Jill Fitcheard, Department of Justice Director Wallace Dietz and members of the community.
In May, a 61-page document by whistleblower Garret Davidson, a retired MNPD lieutenant, alleged misconduct, sexual harassment, abuse of power and internal involvement in the law that led to the closure of police oversight boards across the state.
An open discussion about the state of policing in Nashville is urgently needed. With many questioning the ongoing investigation into the whistleblower document and the debate over the constitutionality of the state’s elimination of police oversight boards, these conversations are necessary to create space for complaints and provide needed clarity on public safety issues.
However, the outcome of that meeting revealed a significant lack of trust between city officials and some members of the community.
There is a serious gap between the community and the city leaders
As one listener aptly put it, the community trusted the Community Oversight Board, which was approved in a 2018 referendum by 134,135 Nashville residents, or 59% of voters. Now, city officials must fully support the Community Review Board if they want to restore the trust shattered by the MNPD repeal and whistleblower complaint.
Conscious Conversations, moderated by Isaac Addae, the municipality’s manager of entrepreneurship and economic development, are “community engagement platforms” where Addae facilitates conversations between the community and relevant stakeholders on important issues.
From the recent Conscious Conversation, it is clear that not enough is being done to actively foster this trust. When Chief Drake and Fitcheard, who are both black, were asked if they meet regularly, they responded that they do not meet at all, except for one instance when Fitcheard was in the Chief’s office.
The two laughed as they told the audience they both wanted to get better. That’s not funny. A reasonable person would assume the police chief and the director of the Police Review Board would make more of an effort to meet, especially given how often Chief Drake mentioned his support of the then COB and now CRB throughout the conversation.
Members of Nashville Organized for Action and Hope (NOAH) in attendance questioned whether or not Chief Drake was aware of the two police officers working with state lawmakers on police oversight legislation.
“Did he know that these officials were working with the state legislature to write this law?” NOAH Vice President and Co-Chair of NOAH’s Criminal Justice Task Force, the Rev. Linda Brown-Saffore, said in a later interview. “Did (Chief Drake) only find out when this whistleblower letter came out that they had been working with them? You’re telling me that (Chief Drake) didn’t know about it, even though someone who could have been his deputy was working on it.”
Chief Drake did not discuss the progress or results of his internal investigation during the Conscious Conversation.
Others in the community would like to see greater consideration and involvement of community organizations in violence intervention and prevention efforts. This sparked an emotional response from Rasheedat Fetuga, founder and CEO of Gideon’s Army, a grassroots restorative justice organization. She told Chief Drake she felt he was lying when he reflected on his support for community oversight and his commitment to restorative justice. Chief Drake disputed this remark, saying, “First of all, I’m not a liar. People who know me know I’m not.”
I later spoke with Fetuga, who told me that the COB, which she was a strong advocate for, and the CRB were having difficulty obtaining records from the MNPD. Flitcheard reiterated this during the meeting, explaining that it can take over 100 days to receive records after an incident report.
“This is not what justice looks like,” Flitcheard said at the Conscious Conversation, which was met with applause from the audience.
Policing in black communities leads to lasting trauma
More than six years after the police killings of Jacques Clemmons and Daniel Hambrick, and four years after the murder of George Floyd sparked the movement to defund the police, Nashville’s black community, like other communities across the country, is still grappling with the same problems: police misconduct and a disconnect between community and police.
According to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit that collects data on police violence nationwide, 2023 was the year with the most police killings in over a decade. Police killed 1,247 people in 2023, 27% of whom were Black. A 2023 Gallup poll found that Black Americans were the least optimistic about community-police relations and fair, respectful treatment by police compared to their non-Black counterparts.
There have been some police reform efforts across the country. In Nashville, this is partly due to Gideon’s Army’s 2016 report, “Driving While Black.” The report found that between 2011 and 2015, MNPD conducted 7.7 times more traffic stops than the national average, with the majority of those being black drivers. The number of traffic stops has dropped significantly since the report, Fetuga said. But that doesn’t negate the deep-rooted trauma associated with policing in black and brown communities.
We saw this just a month ago in the case of Sonya Massey in Illinois. Among the first words Massey said to the police officers who stood at her door were, “Please don’t hurt me,” and among the last words before Deputy Sean Grayson fatally shot her in the face were, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”
North Nashville is no different. According to a study by the Brookings Institution, the 37208 ZIP code had the highest incarceration rate in the country in 2018. The study links poverty to the “deadly cycle” that leads to more police contacts and incarceration in the predominantly Black neighborhood, according to previous reporting by the Tennessean.
Fetuga believes that this pain can only be alleviated if Metro “invests in the communities that are most dependent on policing.”
“Invest in the infrastructure, the economic, academic, public safety, transportation and workforce infrastructure of these communities so that you no longer have to rely on the police,” Fetuga said.
Conscious conversations are a small step in the right direction
For some, this intentional conversation was a necessary start. Several in the audience said they hoped it would not be the last. For Reverend Brown-Saffore of NOAH and Fetuga, much more needs to be done. “It will take more than a three-hour meeting to resolve all of these issues,” Brown-Saffore said, “but it was a good start and I learned so much.”
Fetuga says these talks lack real engagement. “If you make the meeting public, you can’t really get to the heart of what needs to be discussed and you can’t reach agreements,” Fetuga said.
Both views are true. While the Conscious Conversation was a place where concerned community members felt heard and city officials were able to see the people affected by their actions and policies in person, verbal statements can only help so much. Legislation and direct action are much louder. Nashville residents deserve this.
Elena Wilson is a summer intern on the Tennessean’s opinion and engagement journalism team. She is a rising senior studying journalism at the University of Missouri.
